I'm about convinced Data had some HAL9000 thing going on where he lets people win against him at chess ~50% of the time. It's the only goddamn way that scene makes any sense. 'Game of intuition' my eye.

I would say that in chess, you calculate ahead as far as your mind can manage and besides that chess is a game of experience. You learn patterns in the board and infer which position is more favorable to you based on your knowledge of what sort of positions are favorable.

But Data should be able to calculate all possible positions of the board several moves in advance. I suppose since the rules of 3d chess tend to be 'Any piece can arbitrarily move anywhere' it might be an Arimaa situation where there are too many possible moves for Data to calculate.